Afghanistanhttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress
Lee Jones's BlogSat, 24 Mar 2018 17:43:22 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3Iraq and the Chilcot Inquiryhttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=608
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=608#respondSat, 12 Dec 2009 13:43:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=262Over the last few weeks we’ve seen various revelations as people have testified before the Chilcot Inquiry on the invasion of Iraq, and today Tony Blair has given an interview to Fern Britton (!) about the decision to invade, ahead of his appearance next year.

How much new information, however, are we actually learning? Not much, in my view. The inquiry is mostly confirming what sensible and alert people already new. Not that it is worthless to have this knowledge collated and officially confirmed, but the problem with the media coverage announcing the latest testimony with banner headlines is that we can forget how much of this was obvious even before the war begun.

One of the most disturbing stories has been the claim that the idea that Saddam could launch chemical weapons against Britain in 45 minutes was gleaned by MI6 from an Iraqi cab driver who claimed to have overheard a conversation between two Iraqi generals in the back of his taxi. Now, if true, this is clearly lamentable. As it happens, won’t know if it’s true, because Chilcot didn’t even ask the head of the intelligence service about it when he appeared before the inquiry, which gives you some sense of just how thorough this latest official whitewash is going to be. But it’s no more lamentable than the fact that much of the ‘dodgy dossier’ on Iraq was cribbed from a PhD thesis downloaded from the internet – a fact we already knew a long time ago.

Indeed, a lot of the ‘revelations’ about the war relate to this question of intelligence. Yet it has been plain from the very beginning that, in the words of the now infamous ‘Downing Street memo’, the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was taken in 2002, and the intelligence was then “fixed” around the case for war. The taking of this decision in early 2002 was also confirmed in the memoirs of Britain’s then-US ambassador, Christopher Meyer, which came out three years ago. Meyer described Blair as a true believer in regime change in Iraq even before President Bush.

So it is totally unsurprising that Blair himself has now come out and yet again defended his decision to invade Iraq. Asked whether he would still have invaded had he known WMD did not exist, he says:

I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat… I can’t really think we’d be better with him and his two sons in charge, but it’s incredibly difficult. That’s why I sympathise with the people who were against it [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision.

There we have it in a nutshell: I believed it was a good idea to get rid of him, so I used whatever arguments were available to me in order to persuade others to follow me. If WMD hadn’t worked, I’ve have “deployed” other ones.

The intelligence, then, is not the issue. We can debate endlessly about whether or how the intelligence was fixed – masses of evidence points towards the fact it was, even if John Scarlett continues to deny it. But that isn’t the point. The policy-making process started out from a political decision to invade Iraq – and then the process of persuasion began. Naturally this order of events puts enormous pressure on intelligence services and others to come up with the goods, including from taxi drivers and other, frankly rubbish, sources. But to get bogged down in how the case for war was made is a side-show.

The real issue is that Blair had the conviction that Saddam should be removed. He claims that uppermost in his mind was “the notion of him [Saddam] as a threat to the region” because Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against his own people. “This was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind. The threat to the region. Also the fact of how that region was going to change and how in the end it was going to evolve as a region and whilst he was there, I thought and actually still think, it would have been very difficult to have changed it in the right way.”

Not, note, a threat to the UK – so who cares about the 45-minute claim? Even if it was true (which it wasn’t), it was merely instrumentalised to facilitate launching a war to achieve something completely different — not securing the UK population from chemical attack, but remaking the Middle East.

The conversation that we need to be having about Iraq is not about how intelligence is fabricated, but why. The key thing that led to intelligence being fabricated was Blair’s evangelical faith that getting rid of Saddam would be A Good Thing. That was not the debate we had at the time – the debate we had was the “threat” he supposedly posed to us. The question we should have been asked was: “will you support me in removing a dictator who poses no threat to the UK, but who constitutes a block on the Western vision for the future of the Middle East?” We might then have had a rather more mature conversation about whether it is right for Western powers to go around remaking other parts of the world, and indeed whether it is even possible.

My worry is that the inquiry continues to distract us from this fundamental question. President Obama has just announced that 30,000 more US troops would be despatched to Afghanistan, and other NATO states confirmed they would send another 7,000. The goal, we are told, is to help create a stable, peaceful, democratic Afghanistan – i.e., an Afghanistan that meets Western goals, even if those goals have been revised drastically downwards from the initial liberal fantasies peddled in NATO capitals in 2001. So at the very same time that we are poring over the case for the Iraq war, we are escalating another attempt to remake another part of the world. Have we learned the right lessons from Iraq? No. The only lessons the NATO powers take are technocratic ones about the need for better pre-war planning and more boots on the ground to wage bloody “surges” against the domestic population. We still haven’t asked – let alone found an adequate answer to – the question as to whether any of this is even possible, or even desirable.

As for Blair, the continued refrain that “in the end, I had to take the decision”, as much as he respects his critics, is now wearing decidedly thin. What he still doesn’t seem to get is that he took a decision to invade a defenceless, sovereign country based on his own moral convictions about how nasty Saddam was, and how it would be a good idea to get rid of him. He sold the war on quite a different basis to the one he actually made this decision on. So the “I had to make the decision” line just doesn’t carry any weight – it was not a question of “he might have WMD, he might not”, and someone in the end has to weigh the risk and make the decision. It was “I want to get rid of him, how can we sell this idea?” That is what people still find repellent about Blair, and his inability to see that this is in any way a problem – the blithe, lawyerly way he just says that he would have found other arguments to “deploy” – is baffling.

]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=6080Resolving Conflict Around the Worldhttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=588
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=588#respondWed, 02 Jul 2008 19:58:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=239In my first official duty as Rose Research Fellow in International Relations at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, I was asked to sit on a panel on 22 June on ‘Resolving Conflict Around the World’ at an LMH Gaudy (a fancy Oxonian term for reunion). Chairing the panel was Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, formerly Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee and now Tory Shadow Security Minister and National Security Advisor; also on the panel were Seamus Tucker, a Foreign Office official who had served in Indonesia and Afghanistan, and Iain Morley, a prosecutor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

What I found quite interested in Seamus and Iain’s remarks, and what I tried to draw out in my own modest contribution, was the way in which international intervention usually fails to ‘resolve conflict’ and in fact may aggravate it.

Iain pointed out that the seven international criminal courts cost a staggering $1.4bn a year, which is 20% of the UN’s annual budget, and said it was really up to the public to decide whether they were value for money. The Rwandan tribunal (not forgetting the major conflict there was in 1994) has handed down only 33 judgements against a mere 27 individuals! By contrast, the Rwandan option of local reconciliation meetings have resolved 100,000 cases. The main merit, Iain suggested, of the Tribunal was that it had the authority and resources to establish an evidentially-sound, historical narrative through its trials of the major figures, and thus establish what happened. There is one expert on Rwanda I know who would certainly challenge this idea, having been invited to give evidence and turning up before being barred from addressing the Tribunal because his analyses do not fit with the preferred Western understanding of the conflict. But in any case, what I found most interesting was Iain’s statement that Tribunals and charges made against individuals often became ‘political footballs’ which could be used to continue or fuel conflicts; in other words, rather than dispassionately judging historical reality, the courts are inexorably drawn into an ongoing process of conflict and contestation, merely becoming one party to the proceedings.

Even starker were the remarks of Seamus Tucker, recently returned from Afghanistan. He told a very amusing story about being the only speaker of Pashtun at the Foreign Office (to GCSE level) and thus having to accompany NATO’s tribal allies as they trudged up a mountainside in pursuit of the Taliban. He recounted the massive divisions among the Afghan actors themselves, pointing out that they simply did not share NATO’s objectives, making it almost impossible to coordinate effective action, and painted an extraordinarily complex picture of the various agents involved, complicated even further by the involvement of India and Pakistan who are competing to exercise influence over Afghanistan — getting them out, Seamus argued, would necessitate first solving the Kashmir question. But most surprising of all was his very stark comment that we were losing the war in Afghanistan, could not win, and indeed ‘had to lose’. There was nothing we could do there to settle the conflict; we were making it more complex and aggravating the situation; we needed to get out, and allow the Afghans to do a ‘jurga’ and work things out among themselves. Although Seamus was there presumably in his private capacity (although this was not stressed), it would not surprise me if this was now (unstated) official FCO policy. Defence Secretary Des Browne has, after all, been advocating negotiating with the Taliban for a long time now (and as Seamus points out, we had been negotiating with them before the war), despite his pointless rhetoric about NATO winning the war and the Taliban losing.

In my remarks I tried to emphasise this strand, respond to Pauline Neville-Jones’s very lengthy opening remarks, and give my own spin on non-intervention. Dame Pauline had presented a very doom-laden vision of post-Cold War security, giving the usual long list of threats and risks, from climate change to Islamic terrorism to the rise of China. I suggested we are actually safer than we have ever been and invited members of the audience, who had lived through the Cold War (many of them were from the class of 1958) to offer their views – and kept my contribution brief to leave time for that, and questions. I also challenged the idea that China is a problem, or that it is blocking Western agendas at the UN, by pointing out that, historically, a strong China makes for a stable Asia, and that statistically speaking China’s voting behaviour at the UN is increasingly aligned with that of Canada, the EU, the third world, and so on, and that the country that is increasingly isolated at the UN is the USA. I then talked briefly about the obstacles to Western intervention being successful in Burma and the way that intervention tends to externalise dissident movements and make them dependent on foreign support, or to distort outcomes by empowering one side over the other, as in the Sudan, concluding that we had to be very circumspect about the power of intervention to solve any conflict.

I do not think Dame Pauline particularly appreciated my intervention, but there followed a very interesting set of questions from the floor and a good discussion, followed by a nice lunch afterwards where I met a few of my new colleagues for the first time.